Aquarium

by Steven Henry

  “The drugs in your sock drawer, dimwit!” Erin snapped, smacking her fist onto the table. Since Webb was good cop, that left her playing bad cop, and she was just fine with sticking it to this idiot.

  “Where did you get them?” Webb asked. “I need the name of your dealer.”

  “I got no dealer,” Polk muttered.

  Webb sighed and shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry, Mr. Polk. If you don’t cooperate, there’s nothing I can do for you.” He stood up. “I’ll have to recommend the DA prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. Good day.”

  Erin took her cue and stood to follow her boss out of the room.

  She wasn’t the least bit surprised when Polk called, “Wait!” before Webb had even touched the doorknob. They had him.

  “Yes?” Webb inquired politely, turning his head but remaining poised at the exit.

  “There’s this guy, he works at a drugstore, he knows how to get stuff,” Polk said.

  “What’s this guy’s name?” Webb asked. He slid back into his seat. Erin sat down beside him.

  “Pete Ward. Works at the place down at the corner of Seventh and Fifth Avenue.”

  “What kind of stuff can he get?”

  “All kinds. Roofies, X, speed, you name it.”

  “Good, good,” Webb said. “Now, did you know Crystal Winters before you saw her at dinner?”

  “No! I told you, I only saw her for a second!”

  Webb sighed again. “Mr. Polk, you’re not being very helpful.”

  “It’s the truth! You gotta believe me! Why would I lie about that?”

  “Because she OD’d and got tossed in a fish tank!” Erin barked. Polk jumped, then winced as his weight came down on his damaged hindquarters.

  “I know you didn’t mean for her to die,” Webb said gently. “It was an accident, right? You got the dosage a little wrong. Then she stopped breathing and you panicked. You tried to save her, but you didn’t know how. That’ll matter to the jury. They’ll see you tried to keep her alive. But it didn’t work like in the movies and she just lay there. So you knew you had to get rid of the body and wash off any of your skin cells, or your sweat, or anything you’d left on her. But you knew about the security cameras. So you went to the fuse-box and turned off the power to the third floor. That gave you a chance to haul her body into the maintenance room and dump her in with the fish.”

  “That’s not what happened!” Polk protested.

  “Then tell me what did happen, Lloyd,” Webb said. “What did you do?”

  “Nothing! Look, I like girls, okay? But sometimes they need a little encouragement, they want it but they don’t know they do. Know what I mean? Girls these days are scared to say what they want, they’re all repressed and stuff, but they all want it in the end. That’s all the pills are for, to loosen ‘em up a little. But I was workin’ that night. I never do nothin’ with the girls at the hotel. I’d lose my job for that!”

  “Your job’s the least of your worries,” Erin said. “You’re facing serious jail time, Polk. Stop jerking us around.”

  “I’m not!” Polk insisted. “Okay, yeah, they told me about the power outage on Three, so I went to the fuse-box and reset the breaker. But I didn’t turn it off in the first place. The breaker was tripped when I got there!”

  “You better be sure about that,” Erin growled.

  “It was already tripped! I swear!”

  “Convenient,” Erin muttered. “For you.”

  “When did you get the call about the breaker?” Webb asked.

  “Quarter to midnight,” Polk said. “Give or take. One of the guests was watching a movie, I guess, and got pissed when it turned off. Security told me to get on it ASAP.”

  “Who told you to fix it?” Erin asked.

  “Our main security guy,” Polk said. “Barry Caldwell. And I’m telling you, I never saw that girl, Crystal, once she got on the elevator. Never saw her before, never saw her after.”

  “Do you have anything else to add?” Webb asked.

  Polk thought about it. To Erin it looked like he was trying to come up with something that would get them off his case. “Maybe the old guy in the tux did her,” he suggested.

  “The guy you said was paying for it?” Erin asked, raising an eyebrow. “Guys don’t usually need to roofie hookers.”

  “I don’t know!” Polk exclaimed. “I don’t know that guy either! But why aren’t you talking to him?”

  “You’d throw anybody under the bus to save yourself,” Erin said with a deliberate sneer. Then she paused, as if the thought had just struck her. “Who else has access to the fuses?”

  “All the maintenance guys,” Polk said. “And the security guys. Plus management, but they never go in there. Hey!” He snapped his fingers, making the handcuffs rattle. “Feldspar. The manager.”

  “What about him?” Erin asked.

  “He’s a peeping Tom. There’s those hidden cameras over the beds in some of the rooms. He doesn’t think anybody knows about it, but I do.”

  “And you’re just now telling us this,” Erin said, letting him hear the skepticism in her voice.

  “Yeah! He sees everything! You wouldn’t believe what goes on in hotels!”

  “I think we would,” Webb said dryly. “Thank you, Mr. Polk. That’ll be all for now.”

  “So, I can go now?” he asked with sudden hope.

  “Yeah, you can go,” Erin said. “Assuming you can post bail.”

  “Bail? What for? I didn’t kill her!”

  “You still broke a cop’s nose and had a bottle of illegal drugs behind your socks,” she said. “I guess the next time I see you will be at your trial.”

  “Wait!” Polk shouted. “Wait! I did what you asked!”

  “And the judge will take that into consideration,” Webb said. “I meant what I said, Mr. Polk. And assuming you’ve told us the truth, you’re in no danger of being charged with murder.”

  “I need a doctor! I’m gonna get rabies or something!”

  “You won’t get rabies,” Erin said. “Rolf’s had all his shots.”

  “We’ll have a doctor brought down to your cell,” Webb said. “And some food. You a burger guy?” Food, Erin had learned, was often a good incentive to reward perps for cooperation. It was amazing what a man would do for a bag of fast food, especially after a couple days of jail food.

  “Yeah, a cheeseburger would be good,” Polk admitted.

  “What do you think?” Webb asked Erin, once they were back in the observation room.

  Rolf, tail wagging, looked hopefully at Erin. Maybe she wanted to take another crack at the bad guy. If so, he wanted her to know he’d be right there beside her.

  She scratched him behind the ears. “Polk’s a date-raping asshole and I’m glad that other woman smacked him down. I’m even gladder Rolf took a chunk out of his ass. He had motive, means, and opportunity. But he also sounds like he’s telling the truth. He’s a bad guy. I’m just not sure he’s our guy. What do you think, sir?”

  “I agree,” Webb said. “He may have been blowing smoke. On the other hand, I think we want to look a little closer at some of the hotel employees.”

  “Like Feldspar?” Erin asked.

  “Yeah. If he’s really got surveillance cameras set up in the rooms, he’s got to be a suspect. For all we know, he uses hidden cameras to pick victims. There’s a thought. See if there’ve been any complaints of drugging or sexual assault at the hotel in the past.” He held up a hand, stopping Erin’s protest before it got out of her mouth. “I know, I know, it’s the most underreported crime. But if there’s enough of a pattern of behavior, maybe somebody said something. It’s worth a look.”

  “Feldspar could have cut the power,” Erin said thoughtfully. “It’s a little weird that he’d stash the body where he did. He’d have to know it would look bad for the hotel, and might get him caught.”

  “This wasn’t a deliberate murder,” Webb reminded her. “Maybe he panicked. It would’ve been hard to smugg
le the body out of the hotel. Wherever she ended up, he’d have the same problem.”

  “Sir,” Erin said as a thought struck her. “How did the body get from the fifth floor to the third floor?”

  Webb blinked. “We don’t know where she died,” he said. “For all we know, she died in the hallway and the killer just dragged her a few feet.”

  “What about cameras in the elevators?” she asked.

  Webb cursed. “I should’ve thought of that.” He snatched out his phone and poked the screen. It rang a couple of times. “Neshenko?”

  There was a short pause in which Vic said something Erin couldn’t catch. “While you’re looking,” Webb said, “check the elevator footage. I need to know if our victim made it downstairs under her own power. Specifically, I need to know how she got to the third floor.”

  There was a longer pause. Erin imagined Vic complaining about having to look at more hours of security footage. Webb looked tolerant at first, then bored, then irritated.

  “Keep me posted if you find anything,” Webb finally said and hung up without waiting for an answer.

  “I’ll get on the hotel’s complaint history,” Erin said.

  “One other thing,” Webb said. “Call Judge Ferris. Tell him we need a warrant.”

  “For what?”

  “On second thought, don’t bother. Not even Ferris would sign off on this.”

  “What were you thinking, sir?”

  “I was wanting to have a CSU team sweep the hotel for hidden surveillance devices,” he said, shaking his head. “There’s no way. Too much ground to cover. The hotel won’t like it. Imagine if word got out that we were sweeping for mini-cams in their bedrooms. The bad publicity would wreck them. They’d sue the city. And word always gets out. We can’t do this solely on the word of a lowlife like Polk. We need more evidence.”

  “We need evidence so we can collect evidence?” Erin asked with a cynical smile.

  “It’s just like applying for a job,” he said, returning the cynicism with interest. “To get a job, you need two to five years of experience. If you don’t have the experience, you can’t get the experience. That’s the way of the world.”

  “It’s amazing anything ever gets done, sir,” she said. “I’ll see what I can dig up.”

  Back upstairs at her desk, Erin looked through the history of criminal complaints from the hotel. Webb was at his computer collating information, looking for patterns. Erin found the usual stuff: noise complaints, disorderly conduct, and petty theft for the most part. She did find an assault charge, but that had been a guy who’d gotten drunk and hit his wife. Nobody had filed a statement claiming they’d been drugged or sexually assaulted.

  That didn’t mean it hadn’t happened. As Webb had pointed out, rape was chronically underreported. If the victim had been drugged through someone spiking her drink, she might not even have understood exactly what had happened. She might have assumed she’d had a blackout on account of the alcohol, and if she’d known she’d had intercourse, she might have believed she’d consented to it.

  “You should’ve bit Polk on the balls instead of the back-side,” she told Rolf.

  Rolf cocked his head and wagged his tail. If she was offering a rematch, he was game.

  “I think the department would fire me if I trained you to go for the crotch,” she said.

  Rolf lay back down with a sigh, curling into a ball and tucking his snout under his tail.

  Webb’s phone rang. “Webb,” he said. “Hold on a second, I’m putting you on speaker. O’Reilly, come over here.”

  Erin got up and hurried to her commander’s desk, Rolf right at her heels.

  “Go ahead,” Webb said.

  “Schilling was here, all right,” Vic said. “I got him coming into the lobby at eight thirty-two. Looks just like a damn paparazzi. Or is that paparazzo?”

  “I don’t speak Italian,” Webb said. “And I don’t care. You mean he’s carrying a camera?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He probably came straight from dinner after the photo shoot, like he told me,” Erin said. “Except he left this part out.”

  “He goes upstairs to the ballroom,” Vic said. “Camera in the hallway shows him poke his head through the door. A security guy comes up to him, they have some words, Schilling gets mad, stomps off, and leaves.”

  “He left the hotel again?” Webb pressed. “Before the victim left the ballroom?”

  “Yeah. But he must’ve seen her in there.”

  “But he left,” Webb repeated. “Without drugging her.”

  “If he cased the place, he might have marked a side door,” Erin said. “A service entrance, maybe? He could’ve snuck back in.”

  “And he lied to you,” Webb said. “I think it’s time we had our talk with Mr. Schilling. Neshenko, do you know how the victim got to the third floor yet?”

  Vic’s sigh was audible over the phone. “Not yet.”

  “Keep at it,” Webb said. “And good work.”

  “Not a great payoff for doing good work,” Erin said after Webb hung up.

  “Virtue is its own reward,” Webb said. “That’s why they pay us so little.”

  Chapter 9

  “I’ve got rights,” Randy Schilling announced, before Webb and Erin had even had the chance to sit down in the interrogation room.

  “Of course you do,” Webb said agreeably. “And Detective O’Reilly informed you of them when she arrested you. You’ve got rights, we’ve got questions.”

  “The first one is, why did you lie to me?” Erin asked, getting right to the point.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” was Schilling’s predictable comeback.

  “You said you went to a couple of bars after dinner and then you went home,” she said. “What you actually did was go to the InterContinental Hotel to spy on your girlfriend.”

  “How the hell did you know—” Schilling began, then stopped, his brain having apparently caught up with his mouth.

  “Security footage,” Erin said. “Turns out, in this day and age, you always have to assume someone’s watching.”

  “Privacy is so very twentieth-century,” Webb added dryly.

  Schilling looked from one of them to the other. He licked his lips. “Okay, okay,” he said, resorting to what every guilty man said when caught red-handed. “It’s not what it looks like.”

  “And what does it look like?” Erin inquired.

  “I’m not a stalker or anything.”

  “That sounds like something a stalker might say,” Webb said.

  “So I heard she was going to this thing at the InterContinental,” he said. “And I went there, but only so I could make sure she was okay!”

  “You were worried about her safety?” Erin asked, not trying to hide her skepticism.

  “Yeah! Hot young girl like her; anything could happen. I mean, she got murdered, didn’t she?” Schilling asked with an odd note of triumphant satisfaction that made Erin want to reach over the table and bang his head on it a couple of times.

  “You weren’t worried about her safety when you beat her up right before she died,” she said.

  “I never did that! Who the hell told you that?”

  “Sarah Devers told us,” Erin said. “You hit her in the stomach and you used your fists. You thought that wouldn’t leave any marks because there weren’t bruises on the skin. I figure you stayed away from her face because she was a model and you didn’t want to mark up that pretty face of hers.”

  He stared at her in disbelief. “How could she tell you that? She’s dead!”

  “When you hit someone hard in the gut, it bruises the internal organs,” Erin said. “A good Medical Examiner can tell.”

  “And we’ve got the best one in the city,” Webb added.

  “You wrote your relationship all over her with your hands,” Erin said, letting him hear the disgust in her voice. “Is that why you thought you could take me? Because you think women are weaker than you and you can just
do whatever you want with them?”

  “That’s not… I mean, I didn’t… damn it, she just wouldn’t leave me alone! She kept on at me about Gloria, and Raquel, and Cindy. It’s not like we were exclusive or anything! And I was paying her back, getting her good shots, good exposure. Her whole career was because of me! And then she thinks she can go and screw this other guy, like I’m nothing? I should’ve busted those perfect teeth of hers. See how many contracts she’d get trying to smile with a mouth full of dentures!”

  Webb raised an eyebrow and said nothing.

  “Where’d you get the Rohypnol?” Erin asked.

  “The what?”

  “The roofies. The drug you used to knock her out.”

  “She never used,” Schilling said. “All the other girls do. A little speed, mostly, to keep them perky, maybe some ephedrine to help with the weight. But Sarah wouldn’t. That girl was so clean, like her shit didn’t stink. God, she was annoying. If she wasn’t so smoking hot, I would’ve cut loose of her by now. I’m glad she’s gone.”

  “You’re saying you didn’t drug her?” Erin asked.

  “I just told you that! You should’ve seen the look she’d give me at parties. God! What a buzz-kill!”

  “You’re going to jail, Mr. Schilling,” Webb said. “We’ve got you cold on drug possession. Together with the testimony you’ve just given, that should be enough to keep you in there for a good long while. If I find out you’re lying about drugging Sarah, I can personally guarantee your stay behind bars will be especially unpleasant. I know plenty of people at the Department of Corrections. Some of them work there, some live there because I put them there. So this is your last chance to come clean.”

  “I’ve told you everything,” Schilling said sulkily. “I went to the hotel, I saw her on the arm of that rich asshat and then that dickless hotel rent-a-cop kicked me out. Then I went out and got drunk.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell me that in the first place?” Erin demanded.

  “How was it gonna look? And you think a guy likes to talk about his girl cheating on him? I bet your guy doesn’t tell you when he’s screwing around behind your back.”